NYT: “We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers Are”

“The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for ‘good’ in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately.”

We Ran Out of Words to Describe How Good the Jobs Numbers AreBy Neil IrwinThe New York Times’ The Upshot
June 1, 2018

The real question in analyzing the May jobs numbers released Friday is whether there are enough synonyms for “good” in an online thesaurus to describe them adequately.

So, for example, “splendid” and “excellent” fit the bill. Those are the kinds of terms that are appropriate when the United States economy adds 223,000 jobs in a month, despite being nine years into an expansion, and when the unemployment rate falls to 3.8 percent, a new 18-year low.

“Salubrious,” “salutary” and “healthy” work as words to describe the 0.3 percent rise in average hourly earnings, which are up 2.7 percent over the last year …

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And a broader definition of unemployment, which includes people who have given up looking for a job out of frustration, fell to 7.6 percent. The jobless rate for African-Americans fell to 5.9 percent, the lowest on record, which we would count as “great.”

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Then there are other thesaurus synonyms for “good” that we don’t normally use in reference to employment numbers, but which are apropos this month. For example, “congruous,” in the sense that the various pieces of the report align with each other: Employers are creating more jobs, leading more people to work and fewer people to be unemployed, and leading wages to rise.

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[T]he thing to take away from the May numbers is that the United States economy just keeps humming along at a steady pace, putting more people to work and at gradually higher wages.